Stavros Mitchelides - Miami Beach Realtor

04/21/2026

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Reject overdevelopment on Miami Beach + help shape better uses

04/10/2026

Donald DeFesi’s monthly fees for his condominium association in Walnut Creek, Calif., have more than doubled since 2015 to $1,500. He now pays more each month for his association fees, condo insurance and property taxes than he does for the principal and interest on his mortgage.

“I certainly didn’t expect the homeowners association dues to increase as they have,” DeFesi said.

Americans are paying more than ever to homeowners associations, adding to the mounting costs that are driving many would-be buyers out of the housing market.

The median monthly condo fee was $420 in 2025, up 29% from 2019, according to a Realtor.com analysis of for-sale listings. For single-family homeowners, median HOA fees rose 26% from 2019 to $63 last year.

HOA and condo fees aren’t the biggest expense in many household budgets, but they are rising at the same time as near-record home prices and elevated mortgage rates have worsened home-buying affordability. Property-tax bills, home-insurance premiums and utility costs have also climbed in many parts of the country.
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These ballooning costs, said Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com, are “pricing some people out of homeownership.”

Mortgage rates could eventually decline from current levels, allowing homeowners who bought in recent years to refinance for lower payments. A resolution to the conflict in Iran would likely provide some momentum for rates to move lower.

But HOA fees and these other homeownership costs are likely to keep moving in one direction—up.

“That’s going to just either be more of a drain on my savings or more belt-tightening,” DeFesi said.

About 21.6 million households, one-fourth of owner households in the U.S., paid HOA or condo fees in 2024, according to a Census Bureau analysis from September. For about three million of those households, the fee was above $500 a month.

These fees typically cover insurance and maintenance for common spaces and can also include amenities like swimming pools and golf courses. They are rising because property insurance, labor and materials have all grown more expensive.

Surging fees are a major reason that the condo market has been the weakest in more than a decade.

Rebecca Lotsoff has been looking for a two-bedroom condo in the Chicago area since late 2022, and she doesn’t want a monthly fee above $500. But it is hard to find homes that meet her budget and criteria. Most sell above listing price after getting multiple offers, she said.
“It has limited what’s available to me,” she said. “I’m very frustrated.”

For many homeowners, big jumps in their fees can come as a surprise. On top of monthly fees, associations also sometimes issue special assessments to pay for large repairs or other expenses.

In Durango, Colo., Mike Downing’s condo association started raising fees in recent years to cover rising costs and rebuild its financial reserves, said Downing, the board’s president.
Downing and his wife, Christie Downing, paid about $600 in monthly fees when they bought their condo in 2019. Now they pay almost $1,300.

Some owners in the community were angry about the fee increases and argued the higher fees could make it more difficult to sell, he said. “It got kind of nasty,” he said. “It’s a tough calculus for everybody that’s involved.”

HOA and condo fees make up the biggest proportion of home buyers’ mortgage payments in Florida markets, according to Realtor.com, which is operated by News Corp, parent of The Wall Street Journal.

After the 2021 condo collapse in Surfside, Fla., insurers grew stricter about assessing condo safety, and the state enacted new requirements to make sure older buildings are structurally sound. These new expenses pushed up condo fees in the state and led to an increase in owners trying to sell.

For home buyers, avoiding an HOA isn’t always the cheaper option. HOA fees can cover items that homeowners otherwise need to pay for themselves, such as building repairs and snow removal. And associations can sometimes negotiate group rates that keep costs lower.

Some associations are also trying to limit fee increases. Cindy Kielty, who is board president of her homeowners association in St. Charles, Mo., said the association might cut back on services like watering grass to keep its costs down.

Kielty’s fees were about $125 a month when she and her husband bought their home in 2009, and now they pay $350, she said.

“People are just going to have to change their expectations as to what’s going to be covered,” she said. “They have a choice: Do more yourself or pay more money to the HOA.”

Monthly costs of homeowners associations have jumped 26% since 2019; owners can also be hit with special fees for large repairs

04/05/2026

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03/17/2026

Miami is now the world’s #1 real estate bubble risk, warns UBS — with one metric already higher than the 2006 housing crisis.

Florida’s housing market boomed during the pandemic, as Americans flocked to the Sunshine State in search of warmer weather, lower taxes and more space. But that surge has now pushed one of its biggest cities into dangerous territory: Miami has just been ranked the world’s most at-risk housing market.

According to the Global Real Estate Bubble Index 2025 released by UBS, Miami was at the top of its list.

That score puts the city ahead of famously overpriced markets like Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and New York.

The index tracks metrics such as price-to-income and price-to-rent ratios, construction activity and mortgage rates. In Miami, affordability for buyers has fallen to near record lows, yet home prices continue to diverge sharply from rents.

“Over the past 15 years, Miami has posted the strongest inflation-adjusted housing appreciation among all cities in the entire world,” UBS wrote in its report. “The current price-to-rent ratio has surpassed even the extremes of the 2006 property bubble, signaling a high bubble risk.”

What followed that mid-2000s bubble was a complete financial collapse that wiped out trillions in household wealth, triggered a wave of foreclosures and set off the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The study also noted that Miami’s housing inventory has climbed back to near pre-pandemic levels, while regulatory changes are forcing many condo associations to finally tackle decades of deferred maintenance, saddling owners with hefty repair bills.

On top of that, insurance premiums are surging, driven by mounting climate change driven environmental risks such as flooding and hurricanes. These combined costs are prompting more owners to sell, adding to the pressure on the market.

03/05/2026

In 2020, not a single home in Miami sold for more than $50 million. In 2021, there were two sales for over $50 million.

Since then, Miami has become a darling of the super-rich, and in 2025 sold more ultraluxury homes than anywhere else in the world.

This high-end buying frenzy exists in a world unto itself, as the rest of the Miami housing market stagnates, with prices falling and listings languishing.

In and around Miami Beach, a sliver of a barrier island about 1 mile wide, a gold rush is underway. Masters of finance and tech are vying for parcels of land on the gated man-made islands facing Biscayne Bay, with unobstructed views of downtown Miami.

With so few elite properties on the market — in late February, there were just eight single-family homes in Miami listed for more than $50 million — buyers are offering whatever sum it will take to persuade a reluctant homeowner to part with their trophy. The sales often happen off market, negotiated on padel courts, on private yachts and at the La Gorce Country Club, where the golf club initiation fee is $1.2 million. The buyers are among the world’s richest billionaires, including boldfaced names like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos and financiers like hedge fund manager Nick Maounis.

“With all these titans of the universe coming, it’s like the stamp of approval,” said Nancy Batchelor, a Miami real estate agent with Compass.

This buying frenzy is happening against a backdrop of a frozen American housing market, which has seen sales stall and prices fall amid high interest rates, a glut of overpriced inventory and deep economic and global uncertainty.

The median home price in Miami, at $610,000 in January, was down 7.2 percent from the previous year, with homes sitting on the market for a median of 115 days, according to Redfin. Even the merely luxurious homes, those listed between $10 million and $30 million, are sitting on the market for months. But at the top, a battle is on for the best land that can be had.

For most Americans, “there’s just enormous uncertainty in the economy right now,” said Steven Durlauf, the director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago. However, “a small number of people with incomprehensible wealth have a willingness to use it.”

The ultrawealthy are vying for a limited number of exclusive properties on the islands and shorelines of South Florida.

03/04/2026

If you’ve secured a loan and you are closing on a new home in the near future, congratulations. You’ve taken part in an essential middle-class rite of passage—and you’re one of the lucky few.
The mortgage, the cornerstone of wealth building for generations of Americans, is vanishing. Data from the Mortgage Bankers Association show that Americans are applying for fewer mortgages than they have at any point in the past quarter century, including during the worst of the Great Recession, when the jobless rate was more than twice as high. Since the end of 1999, 96 of the 100 lowest readings of the MBA’s weekly index of new mortgage-loan applications have occurred in the past three years.

The American real-estate market is frozen. Mortgage rates have just fallen below 6 percent for the first time since 2022. Still, few families are putting their homes up for sale, few families are buying, and little new stock is being created. High prices and high interest costs are holding working-class households out of the market, and wealthy individuals are making up a larger share of transactions. Young people are facing a future as perpetual renters. With less time to accrue home equity, many will end up poorer in retirement than their parents were.

This overlooked trend has a few obvious causes. After the Great Recession, the Dodd-Frank Act tightened lending and underwriting standards. Mortgage lenders increased the amount of credit extended to wealthy households and reduced the amount of credit extended to middle-income households. (They did not change the amount of credit offered to low-income Americans, who are unlikely to buy a home anyway.) Banks focused more on providing suites of services to the well off, such as home loans, credit cards, and brokerage accounts, and less on making bread-and-butter loans to working families. The changes made the financial system safer, but also made buying a home harder for many people.

At the same time, the country’s home builders sharply cut back on construction, producing a quarter as many properties in the early 2010s as they had before the Great Recession. Despite a recent uptick, they’re still producing roughly 40 percent fewer today, causing the country’s housing shortage to spread from the major coastal cities to smaller cities, suburbs, and rural areas. With supply constrained, prices shot up in the 2010s. The situation created winners. “Folks that bought, particularly pre-pandemic, have benefited from one of the biggest increases in home values that we’ve seen in history,” Michael Fratantoni, the chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association, told me. It also created losers. Many younger families couldn’t save for a down payment, given rising prices, the burden of student-loan payments, and the increasing cost of child care and health insurance.

Read: It will never be a good time to buy a house
When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the Federal Reserve dropped interest rates to zero. More than 6.9 million properties traded hands in 2021, pushing real-estate values up again. Even more borrowers—14 million of them—refinanced their existing loans to secure lower rates in 2020 and 2021. Then rising inflation forced the Fed to jack up borrowing costs. The average rate on a 30-year mortgage climbed from less than 3 percent to as high as 7.5 percent. Homeowners with cheap rates got “locked in,” leading the number of active listings to fall. The deep freeze commenced.

In 2024, families needed an income of $126,700 to qualify for a median-price home, up from $79,600 in 2021, Chris Herbert, the managing director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me. “That priced 8 million renters out of the market,” he said, noting that most renters make $50,000 to $60,000 a year.
Wealthy individuals and institutions became a stronger force. The portion of all-cash purchases rose 33 percent from 2020 to 2023. Cash buyers scooped up more than half of homes in New York City in the first six months of 2025. In West Palm Beach, Cleveland, and Miami, they made up more than a third of purchases. “Mortgage deserts” formed in disinvested neighborhoods, as well as in vacation towns and expensive cities, as real-estate-investment trusts and landlords scooped up “buy low, rent high” properties. In Baltimore, half of homes were purchased without a mortgage in 2022 and 2023, a report by Sharon Cornelissen, the director of housing at the Consumer Federation of America, found. In rural Hudspeth County, Texas, 98 percent were.

The country still has twice as many homeowners as it has renters, and the homeownership rate is down only four percentage points from its George W. Bush-era high. Nevertheless, the share of Americans owning a home has not climbed in five years, despite the low unemployment rate, increase in wages, and boom in asset values—an unprecedented trend. Many younger families just can’t get on the property ladder. In the 1980s, the typical first-time homebuyer was in their late 20s; now they are nearly 40, according to some surveys. In the country’s 50 largest metro regions, only 3.1 percent of people under the age of 30 have a mortgage.

The disappearance of the middle-class mortgage does not represent merely a short-term challenge for individual families. It portends major changes in the long-term financial security of the American middle class. The younger you are when you buy a property, the more time you have to develop equity and the more you benefit from rising real-estate prices. Imagine two people purchasing the same condo with the same loan terms, one at 28 and one at 48. If they both sell at 65, the latter’s settlement check will be only a third as big as the former’s, assuming that home values increase 3 percent a year. Plus, mortgage costs are generally fixed for 30 years, whereas rent goes up annually, sometimes far faster than wages. “Housing wealth provides a lot of stability,” Herbert told me.

Nobody likes paying their mortgage. But many Americans are going to wish they had the chance to.

Young and working-class people aren’t getting on the property ladder anymore.

02/24/2026

New census data suggests that Florida is rapidly losing its appeal.

The pandemic-era migration boom that transformed Florida's politics and housing market has cratered, as rising costs and repeated natural disasters deter newcomers.

By the numbers: Net domestic migration to Florida exploded in 2021, with an inflow of 253,220 new residents from other states — an increase of about 310% year-over-year from 2020, according to U.S. Census data.

That wave crested at 310,892 in 2022, then receded fast: 183,646 in 2023, 58,411 in 2024, and 22,517 in 2025 — a 93% drop in three years.

Florida, which ranked first among all states in domestic migration in 2021 and 2022, sank to No. 8 in 2025.

The events of those years point to several contributors:

💼 Pandemic-era tailwinds like remote work (and jobs in general) are hard to come by, and the rebound of in-person work over the last few years has tied more employees to their desks and their ZIP codes.

🌀 Six hurricanes tore through Florida from 2022 to 2024, four of which were Category 3 or stronger.

Losses from these storms drove up the cost of home insurance, and a 2022 law booted more people off the cheaper, state-run insurer into the private market, where there are fewer guardrails for premium increases.

🏠 Buying a home here costs FAR more now than it did five years ago. Data from Redfin shows that Florida's median sale price rose from $298,300 in January 2021 to $412,800 in January 2026.

The pandemic-era migration boom that transformed Florida's politics and housing market has cratered.

02/18/2026

02/14/2026

Hernando De Escalante Fontaneda was a Spanish shipwreck survivor who spent 17 years living with the Calusa Indians. This except from his memoir, published in 1575, reveals food items consumed by the indigenous people of South Florida and the Keys.

"The common food is fish, turtle, and snails (all of which are alike fish), and tunny and whale; which is according to what I saw while I was among these Indians. Some eat sea-wolves; not all of them, for there is a distinction between the higher and the lower classes, but the principal persons eat them. There is another fish which we here call langosta (lobster), and one like unto a chapin (trunk­ fish), of which they consume not less than of the former."

Meet the sea-wolf. Once, the Florida Keys were covered with Caribbean monk seals. The last seal spotted in the Keys was in 1922. The last confirmed sighting of a Caribbean monk seal came 30 years later, in 1952. The seal was observed at Seranille Bank, found between Jamaica and Nicaragua.

With their numbers decimated by overhunting and their food supplies sufficiently exhausted by overfishing, the isolated populations of seals that were left could not recover.

Though a Caribbean monk seal had not been seen in over 50 years, the species was not officially declared extinct until 2008. What is remarkable about the extinction of the seal is that it is the only pinniped that has been erased from the planet due entirely to human causes.

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01/21/2026

Florida is facing the largest tourism collapse in modern US history.

It was not caused by a hurricane or a pandemic. It came from a political rupture with Canada caused by Trump.

In under two years, more than 280,000 tourism jobs vanished and over $52B was erased. Canadian visitors once brought $38-42B a year into Florida.

That flow collapsed by more than half in a single winter, gutting snowbird dependent counties.

The money did not disappear. It moved.

Between $27-30B per year that once flowed into Florida was redirected inside Canada and to non US destinations. Domestic Canadian tourism SURGED and capital stayed home.

Florida saw widespread property sell offs, shrinking tax bases, frozen projects, and a widening labor crisis across hospitality, healthcare, and local services.

Planning models now assume only ~30% of former Canadian winter spending returns over the next decade, leaving a $35-40B annual hole. Florida is projected to lose 160,000 seasonal residents per year long term.